Tag: cmake

Automake and I have been friends for a long time.  We’ve loved, we’ve laughed, we’ve cried … A lot!  Automake is the de facto build system on unix (especially linux) systems.  I use it in almost all my projects.  Automake isn’t too hard once you stop copying someone else’s Makefile.am’s and configure.ac’s and actually take a few minutes to learn what’s going on.  Although lack of documentation and that horrible language called m4 is a huge turn off.  Although I really like the way automake feels, I’ve felt that it needs to be modernized with a simpler syntax, more cohesive tools, and a decent scripting language.  This and the fact that it doesn’t play nicely under windows (unless you want to build with gcc in cygwin or cross-compile), has left me looking for something new.

2 years ago when I changed direction and started working on different projects, our regular windows builds ceased.  I somehow had become the official builder + releaser guy in our lab.  Every once in a while we’d need to get a new development build out for a windows user.  I’d have to step in, remember how everything worked, fight the system, and eventually come up with a build.

A long time ago, I had everything cross compiling in a chroot environment.  This was nice since I had a shell script which would do everything for me, except the final freezing of python which had to be done in windows.  Over the years the dependencies in the chroot environment became out of date, and things stopped building.  I was busy and never updated the machine, and eventually it was re-purposed for something else.

Then came the windows vmware image with mingw setup (we didn’t need to depend on cygwin for any posix stuff).  This was okay, but more difficult to script, and became a much more manual process which also became a constant update headache.

Recently we wanted to stop building under gcc and move to using visual studio’s compiler.  The build system had stopped working and we were running into issues when creating our python modules.  Automake + libtool would not play nicely with Visual Studio’s compiler, so I started looking at alternatives.

• CMake: The only experience I have with it is building vtk, and it just pisses me off … out
• BJam: Interesting.  Doesn’t have a configure stage but can use autoconf … intersesting, but didn’t see much of a payoff
• SCons:  Seems to have gained the most popularity and works well under windows + unix

After some initial testing, I decided to move our projects over to SCons.  SCons has made some things very easy, like building with Visual Studio’s compiler and handling SWIG.  However, SCons is contantly doing things to annoy me.  Here’s my list of personal annoyances:

• Make it feel more unixy.  Everything about SCons feels foreign
• By default everything should have an install and uninstall target.  None of the alias stuff, and I still don’t have uninstall going
• Something to handle .in files.  We use these all over the place for creating run scripts, pkg-config files, etc..  Automake will automatically read a .in file, replace everything surrounded with @ and write the the new file
• SCons config.h support is terrible.  Hell, I couldn’t even get it to actually write the config.h file until a create a default target depending on config.h
• Running configure is essential.  We build our software on all different OSes with very different configurations.  We must be able to find what packages are available and where they.  If not available, we need to error out or build around it.  SCons has some configure support, but it’s severely lacking.  I also hate the fact that the configure step runs every time you build.  It should be run once and then automatically if a dependency check has changed.  I managed to sort of get around this by creating a dummy configure target that automatically runs the first time, and then dumps off the settings.  Don’t get me started on SCons’s crappy Variable support.
• Better support for pkg-config.  Both using pkgconfig to find packages and support for creating .pc files
• SCons by default doesn’t use your environment.  I understand that they want a clean environment, but this means override CXX with ccache is ignored.  This also means that programs in your extended PATH are ignored.  Even things like overriding the PKG_CONFIG_PATH to find pkgconfig files is ignored.  Annoying!
• Lots of minor things i’m not going to get into

There are plenty of good things about SCons.  I really like working in python, and it’s nice that it works well in windows and unix.  Overall, SCons is mostly working for us, but I am in no way satisfied with it.  I suppose someday I’ll have to write my own build system.